Templates

Making one

Upload a file and place fields, exactly as for a document, or turn a document you have already prepared into a template: its recipients become roles named after those people, its fields keep their places, and any values are left behind. Anyone in the workspace may use a template. Who may change it is up to its creator, admins and owners: everyone, or only those three.

Swapping the file later keeps every field that still has a page to sit on and tells you which ones did not. Archiving a template takes it out of the way without breaking anything already sent from it; it can be restored or duplicated at any time.

Roles

Each role is a signer or receives a copy, and has a place in the signing order. When you use the template you name the person for each role. A role can instead be pinned to one person, name and email, and then needs no input: your own signature on every offer letter, or the landlord on every lease. Role names must be unique within a template.

Reminders and the deadline

A template can carry its own schedule: how long its documents stay open, from 7 to 90 days, and when signers are reminded, including never. Every document made from it starts that way, whether it comes from the app, a public link, a bulk send, the API or an agent. Whoever sends a document can still change its schedule before sending, and that never alters the template. A template with no schedule of its own uses the usual one: 30 days, with reminders on day 3 and day 7.

Prefilled fields and merge tags

A text, date or checkbox field in a template can carry a default value, and can be filled in when the template is used: in the app, by the API, or by an agent. The API names a field by its label. A value handed in beats the default; both are limited to 2,000 characters. Signature and initials fields are never prefilled: only the signer makes those. Defaults and the title pattern accept merge tags, resolved when the document is created; a tag that matches nothing becomes empty, and a raw tag never reaches a signer.

The default title is the template’s name. A pattern such as the one below gives each document its own:

Lease — {{role.Tenant.name}} — {{date}}

Public links

A template can have one public link, off until you turn it on. A visitor who opens it gives their name and email and plays one signer role; every other role must be pinned to a person, so nothing about the visitor is ever guessed. The link is a token and nothing else: no workspace, template or document id is in it.

Bulk send

On the Business plan, a spreadsheet and a template make one document per row. You map columns to roles and fields, review what would go wrong before anything is sent, and can look at row one as a real draft first. Every row is idempotent on its document, so a retry never sends anyone twice, and a row that fails records why while the rest carry on. The results come back as your original columns with a status, a signed date and a link per row, and every signed PDF can be fetched as one zip. In messages and defaults, {{row.Column}} reads a cell by its header.

From code

Sending from a template is one API call: name the people for each role, pass any prefill, and say whether to send. The API reference shows it in curl, TypeScript and Python, filled in with your own template.